What does a cloud solution mean for the everyday in your business?

Welcome back to the second blog in our series by Dave Goodman, Lead Pre-Sales Consultant at paygate. As a predominantly home-based employee, Dave has first-hand experience of working remotely and the challenges this can bring for both individuals and companies as a whole. He brings this experience and his knowledge of the industry into this series of blogs about how paygate’s cloud solutions benefit your business.

In the first blog of this series, I focused on how cloud software reinforces payment security, and how a hosted solution is the key to simpler, faster procedures that save you man-hours and reduce risk.

In this second blog, we’re going to travel to the future and imagine you’ve made the switch to a paygate cloud-based payment processing solution. How will your everyday operations look different when viewed through the cloud and what difference will it make to your business?

Let’s find out.

From day one of being up and running in the cloud you’re going to have new powers in the palm of your hands – you will have the ability to securely access and manage your entire payment procedures from anywhere in the world, anytime.

Imagine a scenario where you have to make a sudden change to your payment scheduled but you’re off-site. Without being tethered to your desk, you’ll be able to view, upload and edit source files, sign, approve and submit payments, run reports and everything in between.

What makes this possible is that your new cloud solution is safely accessed from any internet connected device, whether it’s a laptop, smartphone or tablet, it just has to be reasonably up-to-date and installed with an appropriate Operating System. And there’s absolutely 100% no compromise on security. In fact, security will actually be stepped up and here’s how.

It’s not just the on-premise software itself that prevents you working remotely; if you use a smartcard as part of your process and it’s been left behind in the office (or worse, lost), you’re stuck and you may be unable to avert disruption or delay to your payment schedule. With the paygate cloud solution you can swap smartcards for more secure, on-demand digital signing options such as a Hardware Security Module (HSM).

A cloud-based HSM is instantly available when and where you need it alongside your paygate solution. That means no delays and the flexibility to take action immediately without having to wait until you get back to your desk. There are no PINs to memorise and security can be bolstered by the use of MFA (Multi-factor authentication), typically via SMS-based One-Time PIN.

When it comes to availability of the paygate service, we guarantee a minimum 99.5% uptime which we routinely exceed by some margin. In fact, this far exceeds the availability of the Bacs service too, giving you the peace of mind that your payments solution is always available when you’re working.

At paygate we’re all about making life easier and helping you work more efficiently, so you’ll be pleased to know that both the paygate on-premise and cloud systems enjoy the same familiar and easy-to-use interface. The payment processing procedures are exactly the same too, so your team will not be hindered by having to learn and navigate a whole new system.

And what about Bacs reporting? We know that as well as a smooth and reliable way to access your reports, you also want total confidence in the data. With paygate’s cloud solution, automatic download and distribution of Bacs A-Reports makes your day-to-day reporting simple and effortless

We’ve seen how your new cloud set up gives you high availability, easy access anytime anywhere, the same familiar interface you had with the on-premise version and stronger process security.

There’s more. A cloud solution frees up your IT department’s time too.

They will no longer need to allocate time to update your on-premise software every time a new release is issued. As new regulations emerge – such SHA2, Open Banking and the New Payments Architecture (NPA) – your software will need to be updated to ensure you stay compliant and continue to be able to process payments. With a cloud solution, we take care of everything behind the scenes, with no disruption, no downtime and no additional cost to you.

I hope you have enjoyed this second blog. For a real-life example of paygate cloud in action, read how the University of Cardiff simplified their procedures and reinforced security in this customer story. Click here to download the case study.

Next time, in the last of this series, I’ll be doing a deep-dive into the switching process, showing how our migration process makes it super easy and risk-free to move to a cloud solution in a matter of days.